actical movement) may be
better described as an Indian critique of current Indian views. The
psychology of the Pitakas has certainly enough life to provoke
discussion still, for it receives both appreciative treatment and
uncompromising condemnation at the hands of European scholars. To set it
aside as not worth the labour spent on elucidating it, seems to me an
error of judgment. As a criticism of the doctrine developed in the
Upanishads, it is acute and interesting, even if we hold the Upanishads
to be in the right, and no serious attempt to analyze the human mind can
be without value, for though the facts are before every human being such
attempts are rare. It is singular that so many religions should
prescribe and prophecy for the soul without being able to describe its
nature. Hesitation and diffidence in defining the Deity seem proper and
natural but it is truly surprising that people are not agreed as to the
essential facts about their own consciousness, their selves, souls,
minds and spirits: whether these are the same or different: whether they
are entities or aggregations. The Buddha's answers to these questions
cannot be dismissed as ancient or outlandish, for they are practically
the conclusions arrived at by a distinguished modern psychologist,
William James, who says in his _Psychology_[95], "The states of
consciousness are all that psychology requires to do her work with.
Metaphysics or theology may prove the soul to exist, but for psychology
the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous"
and again "In this book the provisional solution which we have reached
must be the final one: The thoughts themselves are the thinkers."

Equally in sympathy with Buddhist ideas is the philosophy of M. Bergson,
which holds that movement, change, becoming is everything and that there
is nothing else: no things that move and change and become[96]. Huxley
too, speaking of idealism, said "what Berkeley does not seem to have so
clearly perceived is that the non-existence of a substance of mind is
equally arguable.... It is a remarkable indication of the subtlety of
Indian speculation that Gautama should have seen deeper than the
greatest of modern idealists[97]."

Even Mr Bradley says "the soul is a particular group of psychical events
in so far as those events are taken merely as happening in time[98]."
There is a smack of the Pitakas about this, although Mr Bradley's
philosophy as a whole shows lit